The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 145

Chapter 145: 145 | Atrophy is a Wasted Investment

The pain hit like a freight train that had been hiding behind a curtain.

Every muscle in my body locked at the same time. My jaw clenched so hard I heard my teeth grind. My spine went rigid and something deep in my chest cavity compressed like a fist squeezing an engine block. The bones in my forearms burned. My quadriceps fired without permission, launching me off the mattress and onto the floor where I landed on my hands and knees with a thud that I prayed to God didn’t carry through the walls to Sloane’s room.

The agility increase hit different from the others. Where Strength felt like someone shoving reinforced steel cables through my muscle fibers, Agility felt like my entire nervous system was being rewritten. My tendons shortened and lengthened in alternating waves. My ankles popped. My wrists rotated through ranges of motion they’d never attempted. My spine adjusted itself vertebra by vertebra in a cascade that rolled from my tailbone to the base of my skull like a wave of controlled detonations.

Dexterity was almost surgical. My fingers twitched individually, each one recalibrating its relationship with the others. My hand-eye coordination upgraded in a way I could feel happening in real time. The gap between seeing something and reaching for it shrank to almost nothing.

Intelligence. That was the one that always scared me. My brain expanded its processing capacity while I was conscious and aware of the expansion, which produced the specific sensation of being able to think about more things simultaneously while one of those things was my awareness of the process that was letting me think about more things simultaneously. Recursive and awful and over in about four seconds that felt like forty.

Endurance came last and hit the hardest. My cardiovascular system reworked itself from the ground up. My lungs deepened. My heart thickened. My blood vessels widened and strengthened and my recovery baseline, already absurd from Boundless Stamina, settled into something that felt like I could run a marathon and be ready for a second one by the time I crossed the finish line.

Then it stopped.

I lay face-down on the hardwood floor with my cheek against the cool surface and my arms splayed out like I’d been dropped from a helicopter. My t-shirt was soaked through with sweat. A thin line of drool connected my lower lip to the floor.

Attractive.

I peeled myself up. Sat back on my heels. Flexed my hands open and closed.

Oh.

The difference between fifty and eighty was not incremental. It was categorical. I stood and the room felt smaller. Not because the dimensions had changed but because I could move through it faster and with more control. My feet found the floor with a sureness that hadn’t existed before. When I reached for the water bottle on my nightstand, my hand arrived before the thought finished forming.

I checked the screen.

STR: 80

AGI: 80

DEX: 80

INT: 80

END: 80

SP: 3,320

Eighty across the board. Clean. Balanced. Every attribute at the same level, which meant no obvious weaknesses for an observant opponent to exploit and no specialized strengths that would force me into a predictable style. The generalist build. The "I can do everything pretty well and nothing will kill me immediately" build.

Also known as the only build that makes sense when your abilities come from a slot machine and you never know what tool you’ll need next.

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